What comes to mind when I think of David Lynch? I came to his oeuvre late, having seen only bits of Dune as a boy and nothing at all of Twin Peaks. Later, horny and pimply, I'd heard about then rented Lost Highway – three times I paused that movie, then napped. At university, I saw The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive in the theatre, and Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, and thought, meh. I am not a fan, but I fancy his semiotics, his use of signs and symbols that ask you to ask yourself: what comes to mind …?

Lynch has a new album of techno, Crazy Clown Time. At his request, I hiked up the highway to the heart of the Ozarks region, and in Harrison, Arkansas, found four 21-year-old men, and shared the music with them.

"I wouldn't call this techno," said Chantz Wilson.

"The slow ones, they were all right, but it's like, I wasn't too interested in them," said Heath Hudson.

Casey Moore said the beat was "good", and "a morning starter". But David Copeland said "it put me to sleep". None of them had ever heard of David Lynch.

What comes to mind when you think of the Ozarks, smack in middle America? Likely nothing at all. It is probably as familiar to British readers as the Pennines to Americans. Growing up in Detroit, I had no idea about them until I moved to Arkansas to attend university. The small mountain range rises modestly from the Mississippi river flats to the east and the Oklahoma and Kansas plains in the west. Though most of the elevation sits in Missouri, both states share claim to a curious and unique culture.

"The Ozarks is one of America's great regions," wrote Milton D Rafferty in the landmark survey The Ozarks: Land and Life, "set apart physically by rugged terrain and sociologically by inhabitants who profess political conservatism, religious fundamentalism and sectarianism, and a strong belief in the values of rural living … in a word, the boundaries of the Ozarks are vague."

Its rolling topography is arborial, mostly oak, hickory and pine, and the canopy made game meat – deer, bear and feral pig – a dietary supplement in earlier times. Its soil is rocky, dominated by dolomite, and its streams swift and clear. With names such as Wolf, McGarrah, Buchanan and Price, the oldest families are generally (and generously) thought Scottish-Irish, and even today the population is more than 95% white. Once upon a time, Rafferty concluded, the culture held city living in disdain, regarded time casually, belonged to the land and gave little thought either to fitting in or self-actualisation, and favoured commerce over usury in this life and river baptisms for the next.

Playing ball … Chantz Wilson And David Copeland. Photograph: Bobby Ampezzan for the Guardian

What this characterisation calls to mind is mostly all gone, diminished in the first wave by city sewage, trash pickup and cable television; in the second, by education, as law enforcement, nursing and office work transitioned from high-school-diploma-preferred to college-required. The vices of moonshine and homebrew gave way first to marijuana, then methamphetamine. Urban music such as dance and hip-hop has breached the folk-country ramparts. The internet uploaded even the most remote school kids on to the worldwide zeitgeist. The hills are alive with the sound of marimba.

Over an unsecured satellite connection with my brother, serving in the US navy in Qatar, I tell him, "I have a freelance assignment from the Guardian."

"No kidding? That's big."

"Let me ask you, what comes to mind when you hear that a 35-year-old man is headed to a small town in the hills to root around for 21-year-old boys? He wants to play a song for them called Pinky's Dream. He wants them to listen to his techno music."

"Sexual predator."

Worse, on the way up, listening to Crazy Clown Time, I perceived a potential further offense. Three of the track titles – Noah's Ark, Football Game and Speed Roadster – take as their references God, football and autos. These are sacrosanct in Ozark country.

Nonsense, said David. Football Game was the only number that called to mind real-life drama, he said. He could hear it playing to the credits of a movie about high school football: "The football team that just lost slowly walking off the field."

I've never seen these men before in my life, and when I meet them, each one in turn, I look upon them the way I imagine Lynch will. In what ways do they conform to an archetype I've been drawing and redrawing in my thoughts? In what ways are they not what I had in mind? There's Moore, the sleepy-eyed mixed-race kid with the clean thrift-store style from a couple of decades ago. There's the baseball player Wilson, handsome and tall, a community college history student who, when asked his favourite chapter in history, offers up the scientific revolution. Copeland is the other ball player, ursine and warm, who can use his weight to fire off an 88mph fastball; when I ask him for his signature apparel accessory, he says: "New Era hats. I don't wear any curved bill, only flat bill." Then there's Heath Hudson, the most prototypical Ozarker, with small eyes and oversized hands and a primeval whiteness. He was at once the one most enamoured of Harrison and the one most proactively looking for his big break. He's a thespian who's studying to be a cop.

"You know Micki Somers" – our mutual connection, who helped me find these men – "told me you were this big director, and when you called me this morning, I, uh, was surprised to hear your accent was American."

"You thought I was David Lynch? And you thought I'd come from England because that's where the Guardian is?"

"Right! Then I was just, like, 'All right, this guy was probably from England originally but he probably, like, grew up here in America.' So, I was told I was going to listen to music you had wrote, and you were the director, that you're now into the music business, and I was really excited. I was thinking …"

You were thinking this was maybe a big break. "Yeah, exactly. Maybe this will lead to my getting …"

How disappointed are you?

"About a six or a seven."

I asked all four what comes to mind when they pictured England.

"The guards that have to stand still," Hudson said.

"Art galleries," said Moore.

"Dracula," said Copeland.

"Not really old-school," said Wilson, "but like …"

"Just, like, castles," said Copeland.

"Yeah, everything proper. Royalty," said Wilson.

I also asked all four what comes to mind when they imagine the Ozarks.

"God's country," said Wilson, without thinking, like a teenage boy choosing ESPN over school work.

Driving the Ozarks in early autumn, you would think this. The candied red leaves of the sugar maples, the yellow in the elms and hickories. Every few miles the road rises to a vista whence taller peaks loom 20, 40 miles away on the horizon. A fall rain, very cool and persistent, collects in hillside ruts that sooner or later fill the dry creeks that rush the towns inside hollows named Crooked or Miller.

"When I think of the Ozarks, I think hillbilly," said Copeland.

"Here, in Harrison, it probably has to be the KKK," Wilson said.

The Ku Klux Klan. What comes to mind? Men in conical caps and white robes, fiery crosses and nocturnal masses. Real life bogeymen.

Klan lore far exceeds scholarly or journalistic attention, which itself far exceeds the real historical import of the cult. Rumours circulate in states from Mississippi to Maine of undercounted minions, but nothing ever manifests but fear – no marches, no actual robed confabs. Notwithstanding, the direct heir to that legacy of such real terror, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, is Pastor Thom Robb, and he lives just outside Harrison.

"Thom Robb living in Zinc, and Zinc being like 20 minutes from here, I know that's what comes to people's mind, but … it's really a stereotype. There's some racists, I mean, I see it a lot, but, I mean, we have a lot of African-Americans here," Wilson said. "They're just more scared to come out."

That morning, at the town square, a Chevy truck pulled up with its windows down. I heard the familiar inconsiderate, concussive bass of an amplified stereo. I expect it in the city, but not here. Then the singing started: "The workplace is the death of our race/ Our brothers laid off is the truth we had to face/ Take my job, it's equal opportunity/ The least I could do, you were so oppressed by me."

Later, I learn it was an Aryan-identified band called Day of the Sword. The song, There's No Crime (Being White) is online. I keep this incident to myself.

"I mean, I think it's true," Copeland said, referring to the presence of active white supremacy in Harrison. "My dad and brother rolled through town one day, and they ate at this little restaurant, and there were little, like, business cards on the table advertising the KKK."

"Yeah," said Wilson, "you go down the dirt road that Thom Robb lives on and you got a car following you. I mean, he's got cameras on fence posts."

'I've met some of the best people in the world here' ... Casey Moore. Photograph: Bobby Ampezzan for the Guardian

Of course, Moore's not white, and his relationship with Samantha Comet, who is, would nettle the eugenicists. "But you can tell the town's really changing," Moore said. They get looks, sure, but it "used to be [open persecution] back in the day. Supposedly this is still the KKK capital of the world, but I met some of the best people in the world here. I've had my meals paid for. I've had strangers come up and say, 'It makes me so happy to see more black people in this town.' I get discounts some places. They don't say anything, just, here's a discount."

David Lynch asked me to share some music with some 21-year-old Ozark men. I did. In return, they were sincere and candid and inclined toward reflection.

"The beginning of the song Pinky's Dream, when she says, 'Pinky, watch the road,' reminds me of a past girlfriend who would tell me to watch the road. 'Heathy, watch the road,'" Hudson said. "I was usually texting when she would say this."

• Bobby Ampezzan is a staff writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

'It sounded like a joke'

Just off interstate highway 70 on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, The Arts and College Preparatory Academy stands behind a business park facade of tinted glass and polished metal. Students from throughout the Midwestern city go there for its emphasis on artistic expression and its zero-tolerance policy toward bullying – a problem for many at their previous schools.

Among them is 16-year-old Casandra Branham (pictured). Petite and bespectacled, her fine blonde hair dyed a light strawberry hue, Branham commutes to ACPA from the southern edge of Columbus, to focus her energies on drawing, painting and preparation for a dream job in video-game design.

She's a fan of hip-hop, and the Twilight books and movies. She is not, however, big on David Lynch's Crazy Clown Time album.

She was unfamiliar with Lynch's work before receiving an advance copy of Crazy Clown Time for this story. As for her introduction: "It was horrible to me!" she blurts out with a nervous laugh. "It sounded like it was a joke CD," she elaborates, comparing it to the music in film spoofs like Epic Movie.

Asked if there were any particularly bothersome tracks, Branham singled out the Karen O collaboration Pinky's Dream, as well as the seven-minute epic Strange and Unproductive Thinking, which she found to be strange and unproductive. "I felt like there was no point to it."

Yet when pressed, Branham explains that the listening experience wasn't a total loss. She described the mood conjured on Crazy Clown Time as a downer, but calm and relaxing nonetheless, and the instrumental side of Lynch's interpretation of modern blues appealed to her. "The music sounds like something from a vampire-type movie, and I actually like that," she says.

To her ears, the problems begin when someone has to go and start singing: "The words, and the people singing them, reminded me of a super country bumpkin." Her mother, she adds, compared some of the vocalising to Kermit the Frog.

"I actually had my mom listen to it in the car with me this morning, and she was like, 'Is this a real CD? Take it off before your [younger] brother gets influenced by it.'" Melissa Starker